HP Pulls Back The Curtains On The New Pavillion 14 Chromebook

Today, HP finally unveiled the new Chromebook, which is going to be bulkier and more expensive than previous models, but what does the user get in exchange? Well, the one good thing about this new Chromebook is Multi-OS options, giving customers a bit more a choice, as oppose to the typical, Windows… take it or leave it scenario you get with most netbooks and laptops.

One of the big appeals of this new Chromebook, is that is features a 14″ display, which is two full inches larger than any other Chromebook to date. The tradeoff however, is that you the customer will be losing a significant amount of battery-life to fuel that large display. We’re talking about only a 4 hour and 15 minute battery life, hardly anything to write home about.

The added cost of this new Chromebook will get you the you an Intel x86 chipset, as opposed to the regular ARM chipset you’ll get in Samsung models. You can bet that the 1.1GHz Intel Celeron will get you more processing power than you’d get with Samsung. However, it doesn’t look like HP has improved on the RAM, as you’ll still be only getting 2 GB with this new Chromebook, which is, of course, enough to get you from A to B online, but isn’t much power relative to what you’d expect by today’s standards.

At launch, this new Chromebook is going to run you $330 if you want to get it right off the bat. Pretty expensive, considering it’s lack in new technology. Overall, it really feels like you’re paying an arm and a leg for that bigger display, which also increases it’s weight to a whopping 4 lbs (kinda defeats the purpose of a Chromebook doesn’t it?).

One other nice thing however, about this new Chromebook, is the fact that it has a 16 Gig Solid State Drive, which as you may know perform far better than their predecessors, ye olde Hard Drive. Hopefully we’ll see the trend of manufacturers putting SSD’s into their computers, as opposed to hard drives. SSD’s simply allow the RAM to access data FAR faster, and improve the overall performance of the entire machine (and it’s noisiness). It’s also a bit more secure than previous models, running the Trusted Platform Model, or TPM, which helps keeps users’ data protected, and a few other neat features, but overall, this new Chromebook probably isn’t going to justify the price. The only reason you might want to get this new HP Chromebook, is if the larger display is really important to you, otherwise, you probably will want to spend your money on another model.